‘We got off the coach and the National Front was there … People spat at us’
A new book looks at the now unthinkable abuse West Brom’s Three Degrees – Laurie Cunningham, Brendon Batson and Cyrille Regis – were subjected to during the late 70s
three degrees
Laurie Cunningham, Brendon Batson and Cyrille Regis attend the official photocall for West Bromwich Albion's 1978-79 season.
Between 1978 and today, there’s been no great change in the rhythm of a professional footballer’s life. It has remained a routine of training and playing that runs through a nine-month long season. Of course, these days the mechanics of that process are very different. At a top-flight club such as West Brom, the act of preparing players for each season and maintaining them through it is now a forensic science loaded with minutiae on such things as heart rates, refuelling and diet. This doesn’t allow for members of the team to slope off for a cigarette and a fry-up at the end of each session.
As a result, the game itself has become faster and more technical. The rapid proliferation of media has also led to an exponential increase in the amount it is broadcast and reported on and in the attendant interest in it. Yet the most evident and substantive change to the game has been to its economics, and the degree to which at the highest level this has separated those who play football from those who watch it. As well, there has been a marked shift in the demographic of football’s support. It is a general rule that the game in the English Premier League of today is played by very rich young men to an audience that is at least comfortably middle class.
In this respect, the football of the late-1970s is wholly unrecognisable. It wasn’t then gentrified or brand-managed. In some regards it was a simpler, purer game, and in others an uglier one too. Clubs such as West Brom retained a position at the hub of their communities. Often as not, these were the areas of the country most affected by Britain’s economic woes. As at most other clubs, the great majority of those who stood on the terraces at West Brom worked in the factories and plants of the town and its surrounding areas. Right then, these were places and people that were commonly clinging on for survival.
Money was tight and the time had passed when people could afford to go to every game. This much was clear that season in the gates at the Hawthorns. More than 33,000 saw the match against Liverpool, whereas less than 22,000 had turned out for Norwich just two weeks earlier. On 29 November, the derby with Aston Villa attracted a crowd of 35,166. A fortnight after that match the fixture with Middlesbrough brought in 19,865. The players were better off, but not by an unimaginable distance. When Laurie Cunningham left West Brom in 1979, he was on little more than £100 a week. Supporters alternately envied, admired and even idolised him and his team-mates, but they nonetheless continued to inhabit much the same world as them.
For home matches, the Albion players parked their cars at a school across the road from the Hawthorns on Halfords Lane. It was a common sight to see one or other of them deep in conversation with a group of supporters on the walk from there to the ground. During the week, the players were just as likely to be spotted out together in a local pub such as the Four in Hand. It was even known for them to frequent the Marksman off Carters Green, one of the town’s roughest boozers. Cyrille Regis was a regular at a quieter pub a mile up the road in Hill Top, the Star & Garter.
“Cyrille [Regis] was an electrician. He’s a man of the people,” says the supporter John Homer. “That was the thing. As a supporter you knew where the players had come from and had an affinity with them. At that time, football still had humanity. The players were of a generation that appreciated how lucky they were to be in the game. Even though the rewards were not as great, they were still getting paid more than my old man was for working in a brickyard in Netherton.”
The manager, Ron Atkinson, nurtured this connection between the team and its supporters. He instituted a rota for having the players attend supporters’ club meetings throughout the season, telling them it was part of the job of being a footballer. One of his most well-used mantras was that none of them should forget who paid their wages.
“Players were more respectful of supporters in those days, because we were on a level,” insists the goalkeeper Tony Godden. “It was a pretty depressed area, but we’d all of us go along together to the pub opposite the ground on a Saturday night and listen to a bloke on the piano, or a live band. It was all part of joining in with West Bromwich Albion.
“Most of the time, we had Wednesdays off. You only had to go into the dressing room on a Tuesday morning and say it was your turn to go down the Dog and Duck to draw the raffle, and you’d have 15 of the lads saying they’d come along. Nothing silly, but we’d have a few beers, us and the fans.”
Outside of this home environment, the same awful, yawning chasm still opened up that separated Cunningham, Regis and Brendon Batson from the others. All of the players expected stick from opposition fans, but the vitriol being directed at the trio was laced with a particular poison. The sound of it was hostile, but also now as familiar to them as radio static.
This much was true of all of the black players in the English game at the time. Yet their total number was then just 50 or so. In that regard, the collective black presence in the West Brom team made it a magnet for the extremists. At the FA and in the media, the racist abuse continued to go either ignored or unacknowledged. However, it was now so obvious, so prevalent at Albion’s games, that it could be nothing but a fact of life at the club. It even drew the side closer together and gave them a common enemy, albeit one they never did comprehend in the same way.
“How can I say, we talked about it but we also laughed about it,” says Ally Robertson. “The three lads were our mates and we all used to stick together, so it was nothing to us. If they were being called anything, the rest of us would just tell them to try harder to win the game and shut the crowd up.
“I used to say to each of them: ‘If people call you a black so-and-so, then so what? How many times have I been told I’m a Scottish *****?’ I didn’t give two hoots. The thing was we never, ever allowed anyone to call them ‘*****’. That’s derogative. Anyone that did, I’d be the first to punch them.’
“What shocked me when I joined West Brom was the volume,” says Batson. “The noise and level of the abuse was incredible. At times, it was almost like surround sound in the grounds. But it was such a regular occurrence, you almost got used to it.
“We’d get off the coach at away matches and the National Front would be right there in your face. In those days, we didn’t have security and we’d have to run the gauntlet. We’d get to the players’ entrance and there’d be spit on my jacket or Cyrille’s shirt. It was a sign of the times. I don’t recall making a big hue and cry about it. We coped. It wasn’t a new phenomenon to us.
“From when I came to England [from Grenada, aged nine], I was familiar with people shouting at me from cars or on the Underground in London. With the other players in the side, it was none of their business. It didn’t concern them and they weren’t sensitive to it. I also remember speaking to the BBC and confronting them about when they were going to say something about it. They told me it wasn’t possible to make out what was being shouted. What a load of bollocks that was. All of the excuses I got were a joke.”
The three players were also now accustomed to receiving hate mail. Cunningham got the most, on account of his relationship with Nicky Brown [his white fiancee], which was well-publicised. Yet Bryan Robson also recalls being sent vile letters asking him how an Englishman could tolerate having black team-mates. One of the more regular correspondents to the club was an Everton fan, who’d send in an abusive screed each time Albion were due to play on Merseyside. He directed this at Atkinson, urging him not to select his “monkeys” for the game.
It was Cunningham again who attracted the most menacing heat away from the football stadia. Death threats were posted to the house he shared with Brown in Birmingham. On one occasion, a petrol bomb was thrown through the front door. Brown remembers him calmly stamping out the flames licking at the doormat, as if it were the sort of thing that happened every day. His only recourse remained on the pitch. That season, more than any other, he was able to keep striking back and winning games.
At the end of September, West Brom went to play Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. The west London club was another that had become notorious for the ferocity of its support. As at West Ham and Millwall, this was most apparent when there was a black player in the opposition team.
“I wasn’t a Chelsea fan, but my brother-in-law had a season ticket and he took me along to see the game,” recalls Lord Herman Ouseley, now chairman of English football’s anti-racism campaign group Kick It Out. “Going to football as a black man was then a very uncomfortable experience. You had to keep your head down and your wits about you.
“At the beginning of the game, the three West Brom players got fruit thrown at them. Each time one of them touched the ball, the booing was horrendous. After about 20 minutes, Laurie weaved his way through the Chelsea defence and Cyrille banged the ball into the net. The guys sitting around me were enraged. They stood up and the abuse reached a cacophony.
“Not long after, Laurie went through again and set up another goal. They were even more livid. But then one of these gorillas sitting in front of me turned to another and said: ‘Mind you, the ***** is ***** good, isn’t he?’ This was a moment of inspiration for me and I sat there with a glow inside. It was saying, whatever the odds, you can win people over by your talent and perseverance.”
This is an edited extract from The Three Degrees by Paul Rees. Published by Constable, hardback £20, eBook £12.99
